Adam Garrie

Tuesday February 19, 2019

In the year 2001, what ought to be called the most controversial legislation in the history of the United States was rapidly passed through Congress with few objections. The Patriot Act was an almost entirely unconstitutional expansion of American governmental power, all of which could be and subsequently has been directed against American citizens who were otherwise entitled to constitutional protections of their lives, liberties and property. Enacted into law just two months shy of the ten year anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Patriot Act authorised infringements on the civil liberties of Americans that would make many former Soviet KGB officers blush.

In spite of these epoch making changes to the birth rights of all Americans, Congress was given precious little time to debate the Patriot Act, the corporate media was uncritical of Patriot Act and those who dared to speak out against the Patriot Act were scarcely given any meaningful air time in an age when the internet did exist, but when social media as we know it today, did not.

Making matters more frightening was the fact that had George W. Bush not governed alongside a Congress in which he knew he could gather support for his unconstitutional proposals, he would have likely used executive power to impose the terms of the Patriot Act by declaring a national emergency. The same President Bush that suspended the writ of habeas corpus in order to fill the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp with prisoners would have almost certainly not hesitated to impose the conditions of the Patriot Act on the American people single-handedly, had it come to that. Luckily for him though, Congress did what he wanted and no anti-Congressional executive action was required.read on...

Monday February 11, 2019

While the de jure role of state sponsored propaganda is to convince a population to adopt a certain line of thinking on the issues of the day, the de facto function of state sponsored propaganda is rather different. In a society in which even a sizeable minority of the public are capable of critical thinking, few will immediately believe everything they are told, even if they can’t quite put their figure on a specific point of contention.

Because of that, in educated societies as the Soviet Union’s was, state propaganda serves a purpose of alerting people as to what they are forbidden to disagree with in public. In other words, if the official state line as delivered through state sanctioned newspapers, radio and television is that the economy is booming, people are being paid well and on time and that the new housing stock is superior to any other in the world – the authors of such propaganda do not expect those who are under-paid, living in mediocre housing and unable to elevate themselves into a higher living standard, to believe the self-evident nonsense that forms the core of the propaganda.

Instead, as part of the political requirement for society not to fall apart, it is expected that in private, people will complain to their friends and family about the fact that the economy is poor, people are stuck in dead end jobs and that housing is substandard, but that in public one will refrain from voicing these thoughts, because if they did, they would lose their job at a state owned factory, lose their state pension and if they took their message of opposition to greater heights, they could even receive a visit from the police.read on...

Sunday December 17, 2017

US Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis has refuted claims that the US is preparing for war on Iran after US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley led a bizarre press conference in which she stated that Iran has armed Houthi fighters in Yemen and thus violating the terms of the JCPOA (aka Iran nuclear deal). Haley did not provide any evidence to substantiate her claims, claims which are logistically impossible given the Saudi led blockade of Yemen which predates the JCPOA by nearly four months.

As I wrote at the time:

Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, has given an extraordinary 'press conference,' even by her habitually outrageous standards.

First all, it was hardly a 'press conference' as Haley did not answer any of the questions posed to her. Instead, she merely assured journalist that she has evidence to back her up position, although it is not clear what this evidence might look like.

Haley’s position is that since the outbreak of the current crisis in Yemen, beginning in March of 2015, Iran has been supplying Yemen’s Ansar Allah Movement, more commonly known as the Houthis, with the missiles they have sporadically used to target Saudi Arabia and allegedly the UAE.

Thursday September 14, 2017

In the 1990s, US officials, all of whom would go on to serve in the George W. Bush White House, authored two short, but deeply important policy documents that have subsequently been the guiding force behind every major US foreign policy decision taken since the year 2000 and particularly since 9/11.

Both documents provide a simplistic but highly unambiguous blueprint for US foreign police in the Middle East, Russia’s near abroad and East Asia. The contents of the Wolfowitz Doctrine were first published by the New York Times in 1992 after they were leaked to the media. Shortly thereafter, many of the specific threats made in the document were re-written using broader language. In this sense, when comparing the official version with the leaked version, it reads in the manner of the proverbial ‘what I said versus what I meant’ adage.

By contrast, A Clean Break was written in 1996 as a kind of gift to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who apparently was not impressed with the document at the time. In spite of this, the US has implemented many of the recommendations in the document in spite of who was/is in power in Tel Aviv.read on...

Saturday July 22, 2017

In a tirade against Russia based news outlets RT and Sputnik, Donald Trump’s CIA Director Mike Pompeo blasted Russia for interfering not only in the 2016 US Presidential election but “the one before that and the one before that”. This would imply that Russia helped install Barack Obama in the White House even after his severely anti-Russian foreign policy became well known.

These statements are blasted by Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the following way:

If (Pompeo’s) statements mean that we interfered in the elections in 2008 and 2012 that means that President Obama owes us his victories. I’ll refrain from comment. In my opinion, this crosses the lines of what is reasonable.

Pompeo’s assertion came after a tirade in which he said that Russia’s current Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov helped develop a ‘propaganda’ strategy which underlies RT and Sputnik’s alleged purpose. Pompeo further asserted that Gerasimov did this in the early 1970s. According to Pompeo:

His (Gerasimov’s) idea was that you can win wars without firing a single shot, with firing a very few shots in ways that are decidedly not militaristic. And that’s what happened

What changes is the cost to effectuate change through cyber and through RT and Sputnik, the news outlets and through other soft means has just really been lowered. It used to be expensive to run an ad on a television station. Now you simply go online and propagate your message, so they have found an effective tool, an easy way to go reach into our systems and into our culture to achieve the outcome they are looking for.

The ludicrousness of this claim can be easily debunked when one learns that General Gerasimov was born in 1955. If one can conservatively say that 1973 was the ‘early 1970s’, this means that Gerasimov developed a communications strategy that relied on the internet being up to 2017 standards when he was 18 years of age. There is simply no logic in Pompeo’s assertions.read on...

Sunday April 30, 2017

Friday night’s failed missile launch by North Korea has exposed a kind of cognitive dissonance in the western mainstream media and also some alt-media sources.

On the one hand, North Korea is an evil state whose nuclear weapons and advanced delivery systems are capable of setting hell-fire upon East Asia and even parts of the western United States.

At the same time, some of these same sources are promulgating an antithetical narrative that North Korea is little more than an ineffective dictatorship whose weapons delivery systems cannot get off the ground and whose conventional weapons are so lacking that during parades, fake weapons are on display.

The fact that this second narrative has captured hearts and minds across the spectrum is best illustrated by the fact that maverick conservative alt-media figure Milo Yiannopoulos has posted a story about just how poorly North Korea is armed, citing, NBC news, Fox news, and the left-wing UK tabloid Daily Mirror.

So which is it? Is North Korea a kind of bite sized ‘evil empire’ ready and willing to destroy much of the world at a moment’s notice, or is it a comical commie monarchy whose weapons are just for show?

Saturday January 28, 2017

As both a classically trained musician and an audiophile, the 1950s and 1960s was something of a golden age of recorded music.

It was at this time that some of the most remarkable conductors of the 20th century were invited to make recordings on new stereophonic technology, whose sonic qualities equal and in some cases surpass that available in the 21st century. Marketed to eager consumers in the west on super hi-fidelity reel-to-reel tapes or more commonly high quality stereophonic LPs, it was something of a renaissance for classical music listeners. Whilst nothing can equal the magnitude of a powerful live performance, some of the recordings of this era came very close.

It should be said that in the same era, in the Soviet Union, Melodiya Records were churning out masterful symphonic recordings as well, though most only became easily obtainable in the West, many decades later.

This was of course popular culture, and European and Russian classical music was as readily consumed as vocal music, pop and easy listening.

But behind the scenes, something more sinister was happening. Behind what seemed to be the perfect marriage between ageless and peerless music and new shiny stereophonic recording and listening equipment, there were dark forces at work which would ultimately destroy this renaissance. The dark forces in question were those of the CIA.read on...

I happen to disagree. I think there’s a race to the bottom, in order to see how much the American deep state and Congressional supporters of Obama’s neo-liberal ideology can condescend to ordinary Americans.

The truth behind the ‘media wars’ is far less exotic, let alone dramatic than the powers that be would like people to believe.

In business there is something known as the 80/20 Rule which states that 80 percent of all effects stem from 20 percent of all causal occurrences. When applied to retail it can mean that 80 percent of all revenue comes from 20 percent of one’s customer base. It can also mean that 80 percent of sales are derived from 20 percent of one’s inventory.

In media, one can apply this rule in the following ways: 80 percent of a media outlet’s viewership comes from 20 percent of a population who broadly agree with the editorial line of the outlet in question. Indeed, most viewers of media tune in and turn on to hear recent facts (and in some cases fake facts) which help to bolster their inherent views of the world. Clinton voters will watch CNN for reassurance, anti-Zionists will do with same with Press-TV, and neo-liberal globalists will put on BBC World.read on...